The Melting Pot

As people from all over the world continues to migrate across borders, our society needs to draw the line somewhere.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

On this day, 134 years ago in 1892, an Irish teenager named Annie Moore, followed by her younger brothers Anthony and Phillip, stepped off the SS Nevada and into the brand-new Ellis Island Immigration Inspection Station in New York Harbor. The three youngsters, planning to reunite with their parents, were the pilot experiments for the Immigration Act of 1891. This act of congress intended to federalize and regulate what had been up to that point a free-for-all system that allowed European immigrants to slip through the cracks and swell the population of American cities, straining public services and social cohesion. While Annie Moore endured a largely undistinguished existence, dying in 1924 at the age of 50, her legacy lives on with the hundreds of millions of Americans today who do not share the Anglo-Saxon lineage of the nation’s founders.

During the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, more than 12 million mostly European and often impoverished immigrants followed Annie Moore’s journey and permanently abandoned their homelands to what they hoped would be a brighter future on a new continent. These immigrants had many reasons to leave, both political and economic. The brutal Kiev Pogrom of 1881 and Tsar Alexander III’s May Laws the following year that restricted Jewish free movement and commercial activity prompted wave after wave of Jewish settlers into the United States— all enticed by America’s constitutional guarantee of Religious Freedom. An even larger cohort of Catholic Italians, mostly from Southern Italy and hampered by a lack of economic opportunity perpetuated by a lingering feudal social order, also boarded ships bound for a new home with seemingly endless possibilities. They were joined by Poles, Greeks, Hungarians, Swedes— like my own Great-Great Grandparents— and others.

While each European family had their own story as to why they left their old country and their old life behind, these Italians, Greeks, Poles, and more knew they had no future in a repressive and rigidly hierarchical Europe. What was once a country predominantly descended from English protestants was suddenly transformed into a melting pot. The Jews formed strong Jewish-American institutions and have since become an integral segment of American life. The Swedes established successful communities in the agricultural states of the Great Plains before assimilating into American culture within a generation. The Poles, unlike the Swedes, settled in the industrial towns of the Mid-Atlantic and Great Lakes while continuously preserving their Polish heritage. And the Italians… well, I believe you all know that history. However, by the 1920s, American patience with these new arrivals was wearing thin.

Following 30 years of mass immigration, urban public services and social cohesion were even more strained than in 1891 from the arrival of what came to be 12 million largely uneducated European immigrants. After attempts to mandate a literacy test failed to substantially slow the deluge, congress took decisive action and by 1924 institutionalized temporary emergency quotas in 1921 by passing the Johnson-Reed Act, which permanently capped immigration into the United States at 150,000 per year. With these federal interventions, the role of Ellis Island as America’s largest immigrant processing center was made redundant, and the island adopted the role of a far less bustling deportation facility before its permanent closure in 1954. In 1965, President Lyndon Johnson incorporated the decaying facility into the Statue of Liberty National Monument and by 1972 Ellis Island was transitioned into its permanent status as the National Museum of Immigration.

Today, just as in 1891, 1924, and 1965, the year our doors first opened to substantial non-European immigration, the arrival of foreigners into this country remains as divisive of a topic as ever. Progressives demand a return to the ultra-liberal free-for-all that existed before 1892, a policy that saw disastrous results under the Biden Administration and appalling integration failures in Europe. To their complete opposite end, the Trump Administration has proposed an entirely militant approach to deterring and deporting anyone deemed a threat to public safety. This approach, while certainly effective on that front, has a different set of risks— would you be eager to pick strawberries all day? However, we must acknowledge that unlike in 1924, when illiterate Europeans processed at Ellis Island at least shared a comparable Western civilizational foundation, many immigrants today come from cultures entirely alien from our own. Therefore, when formulating an immigration policy for 2026 and beyond, it’s far safer to err on the side of preserving our civilization when the alternative is so dire.

As Ellis Island and mass immigration from Europe side further away from our collective memory, let us acknowledge the crucial role Annie Moore’s disembarkation on January 1, 1892 played in our national story. 40% of Americans can trace their ancestry to Europeans processed on that artificial island jutting out into New York Harbor. This author is among that 40%, though if you remove the Swedes, I’m about as Anglo-Saxon of an American you can find. Now as the United States grapples with differentiating useful immigrants from the truly dangerous ones lest we follow the current path of Europe, it is our mission to remember the legacy of Ellis Island and ensure that those who choose to build a new life in this land of opportunity always do so with the best of intentions. Because if we mess up this equation, the consequences are nothing less than a threat to our very civilization.